CHAPTER XV
I Acquire Vanity—I Meet a Wise Man—The Distaste for Boasting—Imperial Traditions—The First Ambassadors and Consequent Embarrassments—Trappings of Rank—I Display My Knowledge—And Come a Cropper—The Beauties of Calm
The garden theory of my friend the art collector, so Japanese in its completeness, charmed and satisfied me.
"Now," I thought to myself, "I know."
Thenceforward I looked at gardens not with the unenlightened enthusiasm of the casual amateur, but with a critic's eye. Here and there I would make a mental reservation, saying to myself that the man who made this garden had missed something in one respect or another; that the one great principle, the volcanic principle, had not been fully carried out.
So time went on until presently I found myself in Kyoto, the cultivated city of Japan, seated at a table (upon which were glasses and a bottle) beside one of the most interesting Japanese I had met, a man of ripe age and experience and of a philosophical turn of mind. He loved the history, the legends and the psychology of his native land, and enjoyed sifting them through the interpretative screen of his own intelligence.
I listened to him with eager interest.
"To boast," said he, "is, according to our point of view, one of the cardinal sins. We so detest boasting that we go to the other extreme, depreciating anything or anybody connected with ourselves. Thus, when some one says to me, 'Your brother has amassed a fortune; he must be a man of great ability,' I will reply: 'He is not so very able. Perhaps he is only lucky.' As a matter of fact, it happens that my brother is a man of exceptional ability. But I must not say so; it is not good form for me to praise his qualities.
"In speaking of our wives and children we do the same. We say, 'my poor wife,' or, 'my insignificant wife,' although she may fulfil our ideal of everything a woman should be.